Editor’s note: This story includes references to torture related to human trafficking. Reader discretion is advised.

In a small village in Eastern Europe, a young girl named Eloin* lived with her grandparents. They loved and cared for her until she reached puberty, at which point her grandfather stopped calling her by her name and started beating her.

Desperate for affection, teenage Eloin met a handsome, young man who promised the unconditional love she longed for. He brought her to Germany where he, like her grandfather, flipped a switch. He became abusive, controlling, and sold her to a brothel. Eloin never heard from him again.

Unfortunately, Eloin’s story is a common one. As the “brothel of Europe,” Germany is a place where prostitution is legalized and 1.2 million men buy sex every day. The head of Germany’s human trafficking department said that 95% of prostitutes are forced into it and the average age of entry is 12 to15 years old. Thousands of vulnerable girls and young women, mostly from Eastern Europe, have been manipulated and sold.

It is a place of evil and torment often ignored by the rest of the world. But God has seen these women’s misery and, in His compassion, has entered this sphere of darkness. Through the ministry of MTW missionary Adair Evans, and national partners, He is drawing these women into a life of freedom in the gospel.

God sends a friend to bring His daughter to Himself

Growing up, Adair’s experience of Christianity was legalistic and shame-based. She attended a church that reduced the Bible’s message to a set of rules everyone must follow, except for the leaders. When she left her hometown after graduating high school, she wanted nothing to do with God or His hypocritical people. Then in college, she was sexually assaulted.

This traumatic event sent her on a quest for empowerment and meaning. She searched for healing everywhere—New Age spirituality, Buddhism, Stoicism, modern self-help philosophies—but every path ended in despair. 

“I was just kind of flailing,” says Adair. “I didn’t know who I wanted to be or who I was and there was just such an emptiness inside of me.”

At 29, her life in shambles, she moved back home. One day, Adair ran into a life-long acquaintance, a Christian woman named Sharon. What Adair thought was going to be a few minutes of polite small talk turned into Sharon’s faithful presence in Adair’s life.

“She spent three years showing up, pursuing friendship with me, and earning my trust … She was longsuffering with it. She responded to all my angry questions about Christianity and refutations of how Christianity was such a hoax. But the Lord really pressed on her to just stick with it,” says Adair.

One evening, Sharon invited Adair to Bible study. There, Adair heard Psalm 16:1-2: “Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the Lord, ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.’”

“Something in me cracked. I realized, in a moment of painful clarity, that apart from God I truly had nothing good in me and nothing good in my life. Years of numbness and pride and self-protection fell apart in an instant. My heart, which had been hard and calloused for decades, broke open,” she says.

God used Sharon’s committed kindness to soften Adair’s heart for this moment—the moment He called Adair to Himself. From that point on, Adair wanted nothing more than to go tell people trapped in the same hopelessness she had tried to escape for so long about the saving power of Jesus, especially women who were being exploited. She began doing outreach to women working in strip clubs in her hometown but because she majored in German history, she felt a particular burden for Germany.

As she looked into the needs there, she quickly realized that her calling to Germany aligned with her desire to minister to women trapped in sex work. In September 2022, she joined MTW’s team in Munich and started working with a partner church’s outreach ministry in the red-light district.

Anti-trafficking work is a lifeline for Eloin

Every week, Adair and a group of volunteers from MTW’s partner church go into the brothels and spend time with the women. Through consistently showing up and small gestures of care, she gives these young women what Sharon gave to her—someone they can trust when they’ve lost all trust in everyone. She and the volunteers bring them gifts, including Bibles in their own language, and tell them about Jesus who created them, sees them, and values them—so much so that He died to make a way for them to become God’s children.

“It’s remarkably easy to share the gospel because there is not a group more aware of their brokenness than people who are being exploited for sex. They are desperate for a message of hope,” says Adair.

After several months of focusing on outreach ministry, Adair realized she needed to find a way to help the women looking to escape.

“You can’t just say, ‘Oh, you want to leave a criminal network of traffickers? Let’s meet one time a week for a Bible study,’” says Adair. “You have to be able to provide practically for them … and not just immediately. You have to be there for the long haul.”

One of the volunteers from church mentioned the name of an organization that operates safe houses and provides care such as Christian counseling, medical services, education, and life skill training for women exiting trafficked prostitution. Adair connected with them, and within two weeks of volunteering, they asked her to come on board full-time. Now she offers the girls a path to freedom both spiritually and circumstantially. Whenever she visits the brothels, she leaves the safe house’s card behind, encouraging young women to scan the QR code if they ever decide  to leave this life behind.

That card was a lifeline for Eloin.

After six years of working in the brothel, Eloin got pregnant. Not wanting to bring her child into her cruel existence, she decided to end her life. But as she stood sobbing beside a railroad track, ready to throw herself in front of an oncoming train, a small voice inside her head stopped her. She stepped away, resolving to go through with it the next day.

Later that afternoon, Eloin was leaning against the brothel doorway when a woman walked by and said, “God loves you. You are His precious daughter. You are not too dirty, and you are not too far gone.”

Before Eloin could respond, the woman was gone. In that moment she knew that she still had a reason to live and was inspired to pursue a new life. Eloin began asking about the group of “church ladies” who helped women leave the brothels and someone gave Eloin the safe house’s card. She reached out and the team welcomed her to the safe house, oversaw her healing, and told her about her heavenly Father who cherishes her and will never turn on her. Eventually, Eloin put her trust in Jesus. She and her daughter now live in another country where she works for a similar organization, helping other women escape trafficked prostitution and telling them about the redemption Jesus provides.

And she still thinks about the woman who spoke to her about God’s love while passing by on the street. She told Adair, “One day, when I meet her in heaven, I am going to run to her and wrap my arms around her. And she will know the Lord blessed her efforts, and she will see the ripple effect of that one act of obedience as all the other girls who have come to faith as a result run up to her as well. She will be overwhelmed with hugs for eternity.”

Courageously leaving the brothels and finding Jesus

One common question people ask Adair is, “Why don’t the women just leave?” We can easily assume each woman would reach out as soon as Adair offers them a way to safety. But, as Adair explains, desiring freedom and seeking it are two different realities. Their traffickers also once dangled the hope of a better future in front of them and they know all too well how empty that promise can be. They will be brutally punished if caught and are told that their families will be harmed if they ever leave. In addition, they live in a carefully constructed psychological prison of shame, believing the lie that they don’t deserve anything better and aren’t worth saving. It usually takes a traumatic, violent event where the fear of staying outweighs the fear of leaving for a woman to take the courageous step of reaching out for help. This was Anna’s* story.

Anna is from Romania and her mother sold her into prostitution when she was 10.  For the next seven years, she endured a life of forced prostitution. A few months ago, Adair met Anna during one of the outreach visits. As Adair and the volunteers kept visiting and showing care, Anna tentatively gave away a tiny amount of her trust. She became curious about Jesus and asked one evening why He would want someone like her. Still, she was terrified to leave. A week before, her pimp tore out three of her fingernails with pliers because she was 50 euros short on her weekly payment.

One horrifying night, everything changed.

A client drove her out to the middle of nowhere, tortured her for hours, and, believing she was dead, dumped her bloodied body on the side of the road. She woke up in the hospital several hours later having just barely survived. That is when she contacted the safe house.

For the first time in her life, she had her own room, access to healthcare, and people who poured love into her. Through the team’s discipleship, Anna realized that Jesus came to save broken and lowly people like her. Once she understood the depth of Jesus’ love for her, she transformed and began to see herself not as discarded or unworthy but precious in the eyes of her Savior. Today, Anna lives in one of the organization’s long-term apartments and is working on her degree in social work.

“I want to come work here,” Anna told Adair. “I want to reach out to those who are suffering and enslaved and tell them about the Savior who came into a dirty brothel to meet me where I was, brought me out, and gave me hope and a future. I want them to know that no matter how broken they feel, no matter what’s been done to them, Jesus sees them, He weeps for them, and He wants so badly to lead them into freedom. Just like He did for me.”

Everyone needs the gospel

Every day, thousands of women like Eloin and Anna endure unspeakable evil as their bodies are abused and used for someone else’s pleasure. They are purposefully crushed and broken in every way by their captors so that they stay enslaved to the shame and to this life of forced prostitution.  

The only source powerful enough to provide the healing they need is the gospel.

“If you don’t address the spiritual side of things, if you don’t give them a place to lay down that shame, to really help them recognize their worth through the eyes of their Creator, it’s going to be difficult to recover and truly move on,” Adair recently said in an interview on the Stories from the Presbyterian Pew podcast.

But when they do believe the gospel, it upends everything. They no longer live fearful, powerless lives but walk in confidence, clinging to the truth that they are of infinite value to the God of the universe. This is the type of transformation that Christ accomplished for Eloin, Anna, and Sara*.

When Sara arrived in Germany, she expected to begin working for a family as an au pair. Instead, a group of men shoved her into a car and drove her to a brothel. They beat her and told her that she now owed a massive debt—one she could never repay. After three months of daily beatings, she stopped resisting and resigned herself to this living nightmare.

Then one client almost choked her to death because she refused to sleep with him unless he used protection. This reignited her spark to fight and she reached out to the safe house. Through community, counseling, and God’s grace, she began to heal. She told Adair that for the first time in a long time, she no longer feels like a body on a menu but a person and the priceless daughter of her Creator.

“When you see somebody who has been completely broken and beaten down …  when you see that girl just suddenly light up and walk in this freedom of Christ, that is just the most astonishing, beautiful message of the power of the gospel and Jesus’ heart for the literal least of these,” says Adair.

Though not all women currently in the safe house have put their faith in Jesus, all are attending church together. The church members welcome them and are sensitive to the trauma the women are recovering from. This is not a side ministry. As Adair explains, both MTW’s partner church reaching out to the women in the brothels and the church welcoming the women at the safehouse are living out their calling to show mercy to the vulnerable and brokenhearted.

Adair reminds us that the gospel is not only for the women trapped in brothels but for everyone caught in this web of sin—the brothel owners, the guards, the pimps, and the traffickers. It is God’s answer to evil, the light that exposes darkness, softens hardened hearts, and brings repentance where none seemed possible. This is the redeeming power that reached a brothel owner and led him to shut his doors. This power rescued Adair from despair and is now rewriting the stories of Eloin, Anna, and Sara, and, God willing, many more.

*Names have been changed for privacy reasons.